


Sustain and fracture

by fioreofthemarch



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships, M/M, Post-Canon, Valerys tapes, Valoris, shcherbina monologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 16:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19833808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fioreofthemarch/pseuds/fioreofthemarch
Summary: The words reach him in a whisper, faint and restrained. Like the hint of metal on the wind. He can taste the tension in them, and see it in the eyes of the ghoulish men, party men like him, who turn to see him wince. The scientist is dead.Shcherbina comes to terms with of Valery’s death, and learns one final lesson from him before they part ways.





	Sustain and fracture

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! A disclaimer that this work is based on the fictional characters in HBO's Chernobyl and not the real historical figures. However, it is partly inspired by actual events involving the Soviet Union and Boris Shcherbina in 1988.

_By old Russian practice, mere fire and destruction_

_Are all we abandon behind us in war._

_We see alongside us the deaths of our comrades,_

_By old Russian practice, the breast to the fore._

  * Konstantin Siminov



* * *

The words do not reach him the ordinary way, if there is one. They come, like many things through the years, in a whisper, faint and restrained. Like the hint of metal on the wind. He can taste the tension in the words, and see it in the eyes of the ghoulish men, party men like him, who turn to see him wince. Gathered in Moscow, in the high and unforgiving halls of the Kremlin, the Central Committee are not there to gossip, though at the same time they are. All talk is party business. All that is private is public. Shcherbina does not even remember who says the words. 

_The scientist is dead_. 

_What do we do?_

_We contain it._

_On today of all days, he’s sending a message._

_He would not dare._

_Where was he found?_

_Does it matter? Contain it._

Shcherbina tastes blood, the beginnings of a cough that threatens to undo him, but he faces the words head-on. A bull, seeing red, and choosing to blink. _What of it?_ He asks them with an unmoved expression, and so they turn away, satisfied. Shcherbina returns to his conversation, a low-toned rumination on the state of oil prices with one of the lower ministers until, barely heard, Gorbachev’s aide steps into the hall. The meeting is to begin. Above them, the gold paint on the ceiling trim is peeling. 

Even now as the Committee meets, men still sweep the fields of their country. Even though years have passed. They kill the livestock. Turn villages into wastelands. Their skin burns because of it. Their lives, like his own, like all of their lives, shortened because of it. The meeting and its droning, lifeless mutterings drift through Shcherbina, his thoughts suspended in a fog. Focusing is an effort for him. It has been for some time. It is easier to drift. 

He had always known their home to be a bitter land, a cruel and cold place. Once, he had believed it was his destiny to reign in that harshness and forge, through industry, through certainty, an amount of comfort and decency for those who lived within it. Now it felt poisoned. He breathed the open air and found it thick. He looked at the trees in summer, listened to the laughter of children on the street, and wondered if they would die just as slow as he. But for a time...for a time it had been worth it. 

The meeting ends; Shcherbina returns to his apartment, and at last, his thoughts come to the place he had hoped to avoid. 

_The scientist is dead._

For a time, before today, it had been worth it. Barred from ever meeting, without the ability to write or even just pass time on the telephone, not knowing where the other even _was_ \-- it would have been unbearable except to know that there was another who saw the world through the same eyes. When the first snows came after the trial, and time began to pass again, Shcherbina found himself wondering, _Do you see this too, Valera? Did you read the paper today? Was the milk delivered to you sour and watery like mine? It’s worse and worse every year._ Two years it had been now. 

Two years? Shcherbina’s eyes flick to some newspapers before him, and he sees the headlines announcing the anniversary of the disaster, and the date. _26th April, 1988._ He feels the tug of a smile. Two years to the day. _Valera, you didn’t._

More words filter through to him over the coming weeks and months. From within the Party, they trickle slow, like water forced through ancient rocks until they reach an open pass. From without, they are a torrent. The scientist’s name is everywhere. His words -- _tapes_ , half a dozen of them, the dramatic old fool -- are passed hand to hand and turned over into gospel. They are smuggled over borders, they are copied, transcribed, whispered and soon, shouted. His face is in international papers. In Russian papers too! There is no containing the flood he has brought upon them. 

The snows come the second time, but now Shcherbina watches them alone. Each flake fluttering past his kitchen windows stirs a memory, almost enough to break him. He tastes the ash, on the ground and in the air, grey ash and then black, the type that would fall whenever it rained in Pripyat. He hears an exchanged word, sometimes hushed and sometimes shouted, an explanation he doesn’t understand, an apology, and then a briefing that _he_ wrote but Valery delivered. He remembers a glass of vodka raised as their work tent rattled in the wind, those thick-rimmed glasses, removed and cleaned and placed back, the endless phone calls and phone calls and papers and briefings, each man sent to die, working, always working, and at the centre, Shcherbina and _the scientist_ \-- the bull and that fretting, flightless finch of a man -- and each and every smile shared between them. Ah there were so few smiles then, weren’t there? Perhaps that is okay, given the circumstances, but there _was_ happiness there, wasn’t there? In its own strange way. 

Shcherbina finds a smile in the thought of it all. It is the first in months. The first since he and Valery last spoke. It lifts him, just enough, to remind him and to plunge him down and down deep below where he recognises himself. Because Valery is dead. Dead, gone and gone forever after such a bright and burning time. Hung from the neck, and two years to the day. Bile forms in Shcherbina’s throat. Or blood. Both. Damn that bastard. How could he do this? How could he _leave_ , and let that damn reactor consume what remained? _You bastard. You son of a bitch._

A glass shatters. In the blindness of rage, he has thrown his at a wall. The pieces scatter on the linoleum of the kitchen where he finds himself, the wallpaper dripping now with old vodka. He’s alone, and on the table are papers and articles and Valery’s damned face, those glasses that don’t fit, those eyes that see right through him. He pounds a fist into the table. And again, and again and again as the rage returns for a second round. _How dare you? Fuck you,_ _fuck you._ _I could do this knowing you lived. But you quit. You quit, Legasov, you gave in!_

When he is done, Shcherbina finds another glass, and pours. He drinks, and coughs. And coughs. He finds a bandage for his bloodied hand, pierced at some point and in some place by a stray shard of glass. The coughs don’t leave him, each wheeze longer and shallower. It would not be long now until the illness runs its course, Shcherbina thinks, as Valery had warned him it would. Maybe they would see each other in the afterlife, assuming they are going to the same place. 

The snows begin to fall heavier. Shcherbina’s lungs begin to fill with blood. Or, so the Doctors say. It feels like the country is retreating. At night, the streets are empty. The people wrap themselves in ever growing layers. Chains are lanced to car tires in vain protest. Shcherbina hears them day and night, metal clinking on the icy roads. The year is nearly at its close when, at last, Valery Legasov’s words are given back to him. His tapes were heard. His recommendations taken in. His name cleared, and spoken now, in public. The reactors are fixed. The problem allayed, for now. 

But more tragedies come. Always more in a land this vast. 

In the depth of winter, when December is still young, the ground under Soviet Armenia wakes in fright. It is the worst earthquake in the memory of the Soviet Union, so great that even the Party shakes. _How much more can the Union take?_ The apparatchiks whisper from their positions of authority, of height, looking down upon their people _. How much longer, before the splinters become cracks become crevices and then caverns?_ The snows continue to fall, burying the broken ground. The water freezes. The electricity fails. Hundreds die in a matter of weeks; _thousands._

Again the Central Committee gather in the Kremlin’s halls. They appoint a commission, and as the reward for his _heroism_ at Chernobyl, Shcherbina is made its leader. His life has been given over to such things, it seems. 

The men and women, esteemed and ordained from all branches minor and significant of the Party, sit in that same blanched and harsh meeting hall where the Chernobyl commission had met. A dozen or more of them crowd around the table, General Secretary Gorbachev again in the Chair. For a moment Shcherbina meets his eyes. They are draped with weathered bags of greying skin, worn by more than age alone. Shcherbina knows that Gorbachev sees the same in him, and that in that moment their thoughts too are the same: _it is all happening again._

As the meeting’s proceedings begin, Shcherbina’s senses leave him for a moment and he turns to ask Valery Legasov what he thinks of all this. Turns to the seat where Valery once sat. He meets the eyes of a man he does not know, in a position he has not earned. Just a man who is not the man he needs. A cough rises fast in Shcherbina’s throat, blood pooling on his tongue. He composes himself, finds his handkerchief. 

_Enough of this,_ he thinks, _he did not die for you to live a fool._ Shcherbina sits and listens during the meeting, finding his voice when needed, giving his briefing of all that he knows and all that he doesn’t. At the end of it, he is being sent to Armenia, just as he was once sent to Pripyat. To make order from chaos. To save the Soviet people. To shorten his life, as well. 

It is not all for naught, and Shcherbina does not wish to go again to the edge of hell with a bitter heart. There are people he can help, and help better than he ever could have before Chernobyl. From all around the world, aid and supplies and men and _help_ are brought in, even from America, at Shcherbina’s suggestion. What would Valery think of that, he wonders, and supposes there is a way to find an answer, of a kind. 

Soviet Armenia lies to the north of the Union. It far enough away and now filled with enough chaos that, with the right amount of discretion, a series of six tapes can be acquired and delivered to Spitak, the epicentre of the damage. Shcherbina would hear them, if only to hear _him_. 

When Valery’s tapes are delivered, in a discrete though garishly painted biscuit tin, Schcherbina retires to his work trailer with orders not to be disturbed. The door locked and the shutters drawn, Shcherbina listens to the tapes one after the other, never once pausing. When it begins he cannot help but smile. That voice. He had nearly forgotten it, he realises! That voice that cared so much. That felt so much. The voice of the scientist, needing to tell his truth even if it was to the void. It was what the Party would have hoped, but the Party be damned. Valery Legasov has had the final word. 

After hours, the tapes end: _I’ve given you all I have. I know you will do your best_. And then, a click. The tapes are finished. Valery is gone, and Boris Shcherbina breaks. He weeps, hand to his face, coughing blood and phlegm and hacking it into an already stained handkerchief. He does not care who hears, if anyone hears. The pain -- so long sustained -- now fractures within him. It creates a wound, that he can now allow to heal. 

When he is done, he thinks of what happened at the end of those tapes. Did Valery feel fear? Was he hesitant? Or did he face his decision -- his final decision -- with dignity and with determination? Boris chooses to believe a truth that does his friend justice. _Justice_. What justice is it? To die, alone and powerless in such a way?

Boris leans back, lies still a long time. He realises he was wrong -- Valery did not give in -- and even in death, he is teaching him this lesson. The thought brings him a mixture of peace and rage, as he now understands the truth; 

_It was the State that killed you, Valera._

Not the accident, or the anxiety and despair that followed, or even the dust that collected in their lungs. It was the Union, the Party, the Committee, that machine of pride and preening in which they all lived. It caged Valery and clipped his wings, and Shcherbina stood by to do little more than imagine peering through those bars. But Valery fought it until his end, _with_ his end, and won. _And now I must grieve for you, you smart bastard._

Shcherbina coughs again, harder this time, so much so that he is crying. He wants to weep for hours, but the fatigue in his chest forces him to stop. He could kill himself like this, so instead he packs the tapes away, and leaves them behind. Maybe later he will burn them. 

Emerging from the trailer, Shcherbina sees not a power plant, but an entire region in peril. The work site is little more than a cleared field, and it is bordered by mounds of debris that were once simple houses. Dust is thick in the air, illuminated by the setting sun. There is much to do, and incredibly, he has heard it will take longer than Chernobyl did, and cost even more. 

Shcherbina decides then that he will work, and work hard, in this damned machine for as long as his body lived. He would continue on without Valery -- a bull without its dancer to keep it in check -- and do all the good that he could do. 

Amongst the dust and ruin, he hears those final words again.

_I have given you all I have._

_I know you will do your best._


End file.
